There comes an occasion in our daily lives when we all love a nice meal out. When arriving at a restaurant, there’s a significant piece of literature that awaits us; the menu. There’s nothing more that diners anticipate than the food and it is the food that defines their culinary experience, but the menu is what leads them there, and there is more to a menu than merely just listing what food they have and how much it costs. Just like how chefs put so much care into their food, so much care also goes into the structure of the menu itself.
The concept of menu engineering originated in 1982 by hospitality researchers Michael L. Kasavana and Donald I. Smith, who co-authored their book Menu Engineering: A Practical Guide to Menu Analysis. The book depicts the system that restaurants use to structure their menu, which involves analysing sales data, food costs and contribution margins (selling cost minus food cost) in order to maximise profitability. There is a matrix that is split into four quadrants; Stars (High Profit, High Popularity), Puzzles (High Profit, Low Popularity), Plowhorses (Low Profit, High Popularity) and Dogs (Low Profit, Low Popularity). These segments are how restaurants determine which items on their menu justify their place and which don’t and helps measure profit versus popularity. While the stars indicate the best menu items and dogs indicate the worst menu items, the puzzles and plowhorses are the items that would be most considered in need of refinement in order to improve their position on the Menu Engineering Matrix. Nowadays there are plenty of menu engineering companies that work closely with restaurants and help. Menu engineer Gregg Rapp of Menu Engineers said; “For a large chain that might have a million people a day coming into their restaurants around the world, it can take up to 18 months to put out a menu as we test everything on it three times.” This demonstrates how much care goes into curating the right menu, especially for establishments that has a huge customer base, and the pressure there is to ensure that a restaurant’s menu has something that a huge intake of customers will enjoy.
“Even the binding around the menu is passing us important messages about the kind of experience we are about to have. There are a lot of elements on a menu that can be changed to nudge the customer in one way or another.” Explained Charles Spence to BBC Future in 2020. A restaurant menu has many hidden marketing strategies within, such as using a bold typeface to state the name of the dish and an Italic typeface to describe each dish and grab a customer’s attention. It seems strange to think that a typeface can play a role in a diner’s decision making when it comes to ordering, but a bold font has better readability and gives items of text emphasis, whereas an Italic font has an air of elegance that suggests luxury and sophistication and its forward slant can give the text energy, creating dynamism to readers. Adjectives are also important when it comes to marketing food, with words like ‘crispy’ and ‘gooey’ used to describe a dish’s texture, which creates sensory expectations, and words ‘artisan’ and ‘premium’ create a sense of luxury that would justify paying a higher price for a certain product as opposed to a cheaper one. The ‘this is not just food, this is M&S food’ advertisement campaign by retailed Marks & Spencer was particularly striking because of its indulgent, sensual adjectives which left so much of an impression with viewers that saw sales of one of the products advertised, a Marks & Spencer brand chocolate pudding, soar by 3,500%. Descriptors play an important role in food marketing as they draw people in and triggers a sensory desire as food is usually what satisfies internal sensors.
You don’t need to explain to a foodie just how much effort it takes to craft a recipe and put together a perfect dish, but crafting a menu is more of a challenge than many would assume. Kasavana and Smith’s book started an entire industry dedicated to menu engineering. A lot of business expertise is required to create the menu itself, particularly when profitability comes into what stays on the menu and what has to go. Menu fonts also play a part in the profitability of certain items, as this particular technique is what helps grab the attention of customers towards various items on the menu. A chef will always be the creator of the food the customers eat, but the menu and the structuring that goes into it is what really sells the food on offer.
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